Brian Griffith's Reviews > Things I've Been Silent About

Nafisi sets aside the Persian taboo on revealing her family's realities to the world. The characters she presents are successful, socially engaged people with maddening obsessive-compulsive urges. Their lives are like journal entries full of self-contradicting edits. The whole country is editing itself, passionately erasing and redrafting. Maybe the best thing in the story is the family's engagement with the classical literature of Iran, which offers a backdrop of irreverent playfulness, passion for beauty, and love that won't be bound by rules.